Why and how does the media use research?

people involved in the new release of a new magazine need to know certain information they fing through market research. eg. they would need to find out:

• their competition
  
• target audience
• distribution (advertisments, how much you should charge?)
• content (what will be in it, and whether it will be appropriate for the target audience)
• Selling to your target audience is just as important as important as selling to your advertisers

Market research is very important but only if you get it right, good and accurate market research can save a company a lot of money and time, bad MR can cost you.

We looked at IPC (a famous publisher) and their ways to entice adverticers (market reseach) through the popular NME magazine.

• The sheet shows a list of demographics, showing age, gender and social class

The NME audience catagory says ABC1 which is quite high, although not entirely accurate, this tells advertisers that rich people read the mag and would be willing to buy expensive products. This encourages adverisers to pay more to advertise there products in the NME magazine.

social grade	occupation
A	higher managerial, administrative or professional
B	intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1	supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional

Psychographics are the audiences interests, beliefs and views on things. It is a way to identiy a more specific audience catagory, this could be a middle class man or woman, working class, student or children. There is different levels of researching this, some will go into depth and try to guess exactly what the reader is thinking, or just discussing what music they are into. Often high budget Psychographics are very cheesy and can be a massive generalisation, where they have identified a specific person or group which will read there magazine. Large companies will higher other companies to do this research for them, these people are called media researchers.

Social Media Research

We studied an article which describes the successes of social media within several different companies. The article begins with what it is like to do media research and how it is useful.. 'Listening to the buzz of conversations on social media is a hot area in online marketing, so it’s no surprise many brands are taking this a step further and not only listening to social media conversations but asking some market research questions of their target audience'. However it does warn readers that media research isn't perfect 'The word of caution - social media doesn’t reach all strata of society, so some traditional research methods are still needed for a full picture'.

“We used to send out thousands of questionnaires, then it took weeks for them to come back and us go through them. We used to have boxes and boxes to process,” she says. “Now we put out a questionnaire and get far quicker responses- Low-cost, near-instant feedback and answers you can go back and clarify are proving a useful mix of features for brands that believe they can find their target audience in social media. My Immediate reaction to reading this is that although these people have been employed to carry to target advertisers and audiences accuratly, it seems that we (their audience0 are doing their work for them.


http://www.nma.co.uk/features/social-media-research/3016672.article